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Lancea et Sanctum
Lancea et Sanctum The Sanctified "This is my blood, do this in rememberance of me or I won't allow you to forget it." The Cenobite’s sermon at the Sunset Mass uses as its text Eschaton 12:13, “But God will not bless those who waste their faith on Him.” The living, he says, are saved through faith by the Grace of God, but the dead, they have no such recourse. Ours, she says, is a faith of praxis; we do God’s will, always doing, always striving, and it is in action that our damnation is sanctified. All four of us shift in the pew, uneasily. She usually does one of these sermons when she needs something. The others have nothing to worry about. They’re laity. But I’m part of the Parish Council. After the final malediction and dismissal, I wait for the shortest possible seemly interval before leaving, but she is there already, at the door of the chapel. Under the dappled illumination of the stained glass image of Saint Longinus, all in red, I can see something crawling under the edge of her habit, just above her eyebrows. I imagine maggots burrowing into her forehead. This is how they ask you: As you’re leaving, as you shake hands and offer your thanks and it’s as normal as it can be, at the point when you’re most vulnerable. They never order, but the request is from God, and you can’t say no. She knows things about me I never confessed. Last time, I was asked to keep a rivet from the armor of Saint Daniel in my possession for a month, in a locket around my neck. The time before that, I had to steal a copy of a book about the Plague Angel from the University Library’s Secure Collection, and burn it before the Others found it. And the time before that…that was when I had to visit the priest and find out if he was worthy. I am told that vampires do not really dream. I still have nightmares about that time. It’s always something simple they ask you to do, until…until it isn’t. You want to join the Lancea et Sanctum because You value tradition. You might not think things are great as they are, but you believe they’ll be worse if change comes. You seek to find meaning in your condition as a vampire. You are curious about the past. You are afraid of Hell. The big picture The Lancea et Sanctum is, quite simply, the organized church of the Kindred. God cursed vampires to be hungry and dead, and in their damnation they are called to do God’s work. In the Book of Job, Satan is God’s agent in the torment of an innocent man, tempting him to blasphemy. The Sanctified see themselves as doing the same: They torment the innocent, and root out those whose faith is weak. The Lancea et Sanctum is to the Church Universal what the individual vampire is to a living believer: a parasite; a monster that feeds, and corrupts, and mimics. But in so doing, the Sanctified do the will of God Himself. They produce the trials and persecutions that refine the faithful and weed out the unbeliever. They send the faithful to the right hand of Jesus, a place forever denied to the Damned. A Lancea et Sanctum theologian once called the organization “the Third Version of Judas,” the true betrayers who are too pious to be allowed the consolations of goodness. The ambivalent relationship of the Sanctified to their living flocks is a case in point. While they have for centuries maintained a strict rule that they do not worship alongside the living, vampiric shepherds do everything they can to make sure these churches survive, pursuing those who would persecute or otherwise harm the living church with terrifying viciousness. On the other hand, the Sanctified believe that they must keep their flocks strong. With fear, a Sanctified monster keeps the wayward children of Mother Church on the straight and narrow: teenagers are terrified into maintaining their virginity by the monsters who hunt at Lovers’ Leap; an abusive priest is fed on, and then driven to suicide; a family is frightened into staying with the church by nightmares and supernatural portents. With temptations, the monsters weed out the weak: A vampire plays on the deep-seated doubts of a nun, driving her to experimentation and addiction, then to prostitution and finally to homelessness and death; a televangelist is given the opportunity to embezzle funds from the Rwandan Orphanage Appeal; a student Bible-group leader is lured to his doom by a beautiful, dark woman. All too often those whom the Sanctified tempt and are found wanting become the next generation of the Sanctified themselves, rising from the grave to atone for the unforgivable. The devotees of the Lancea et Sanctum consider themselves to be the moral center of the Kindred. They are the clergy who minister to the laity of other covenants, who merely attend services. The Lancea et Sanctum’s divine monsters are the archivists and librarians of the Kindred. Just as medieval monks were the keepers of knowledge, the Sanctified maintain some of the oldest records of the Kindred, and most cities with a significant Lancea et Sanctum presence have a Black Collection of histories, diaries and sacred texts. A small Lancea et Sanctum printing press even exists — the Society for the Promulgation of Longinian Doctrine — producing printed-on-demand texts for dissemination among the dead (and only among the dead). The most significant of these texts is The Testament of Longinus, the vampires’ Bible. Of course, just like their medieval daylight predecessors, the Lancea et Sanctum’s librarians suppress or destroy as many books as they keep. The Sanctified just as often keep artifacts and texts far away from the prying eyes and grasping fingers of the curious, both living and dead. Where we came from: Longinus, the centurion who thrust his spear into the side of Christ, was (our tradition says) transfigured by the gore of the Savior, and became unique among the dead, a vampire unlike any other. Compiling The Testament of Longinus, a Testament for the dead to mirror the New Testament of the Living, Longinus’ disciples founded the vampiric church many of the dead still follow, lancea et sanctum, chapel and spear. The “Chapel” represents the church that Longinus’s followers founded; the “Spear” is the spear that pierced that side of Christ, which is now seen as a metaphor for the church’s role as a thorn in the side of both the living church and the moral conscience of the church of the dead. Where we came from It was the Lancea et Sanctum that presided over the fall of the Camarilla, Ancient Rome’s legendary vampire government, and which, along with the Invictus that was built on the Camarilla’s decaying foundations, was the primary moving force of Kindred government. It was a Sanctified Bishop in Constantinople who first formulated the Traditions, and it was the Lancea et Sanctum that enforced the practice of Masquerade. Theirs are the oldest surviving Kindred-written texts. The Enlightenment brought the rise of the newer covenants — the Carthians, the Ordo Dracul — and their new ways; and the hold of the Lancea et Sanctum over the minds of the dead waned, just as that of the temporal Church began to waver. When later still the Circle of the Crone unified and became a word-of-mouth movement in its own right, the Lancea et Sanctum became once more as it was in Rome, just one of a number of covenants. Do not underestimate the power of the vampire church, however. Faith is still a powerful mover in the lives of millions, and wherever some expression of Christianity exists in numbers, there the Sanctified are. Our practices The Lancea et Sanctum tends, in almost everything we do, to try at least to preserve the old ways, to maintain things as they are, or at least as the Sanctified believe they should be. Even if a Sanctified corpse brings chaos and tragedy to a living community, her intention is to prevent larger changes. The Sanctified preach. We believe all Kindred exist in the context of Longinus’ Church Eternal: the priests and divines (the Lancea et Sanctum), the laity (all those outside of the covenant who respect Longinus and take the sacraments), and the doubly damned heretic (everyone else, but particularly the Circle of the Crone). This is why we behave as a church, organizing services, and why we interfere in the temporal politics of the Damned — all the better to push our agenda, which some consider the most conservative of any of the covenants. This conservatism brings us often into conflict with the Circle of the Crone, whose neo-pagan syntheses of what the Sanctified often see as old heresies and apostasies leaves a bitter taste. The Sanctified study, and that study is often dangerous, since we are at our most militant when finding and acquiring historical documents and artifacts — or destroying them, and all the traces with them. The truths the Lancea et Sanctum seek are dangerous, and our neonates may be asked to guard, steal, or destroy all sorts of truths without ever finding out what these truths are. A book. A thighbone. A petrified canine tooth, elongated and carved in tiny Latin letters with Malediction 19:6 — “I gorge myself on their hypocrisy.” A vial of dust. An incorruptible apple, two thousand years old. An owl feather in a golden reliquary. A plague jar, sealed for centuries but still swarming with living flies. A clay coffin containing someone old and sleeping, whose knowledge offers a terrible threat to the leaders of the covenant but whose power demands that he must not be disturbed. One important aspect of Sanctified study is Theban Sorcery , the dark miracles handed down from the most ancient Egyptian cenobites. The greatest secrets of our sorcery are known to the Lancea et Sanctum’s priests — secrets they pass on sparingly, if at all. The Sanctified also deal with the living, manipulating church leaders and religious congregations for their own purposes. We might send a neonate to put a minister to the test with the temptations of sex, or drugs, or darker things. Or to whisper in an evangelist’s ear at night, the better to control the politics of a city. A church soup kitchen is both a great place to hide and a source of easy blood; a protest in front of an abortion clinic creates a distraction, allowing for blood and drugs to be stolen; a few drops of Vitae in the jar of consecrated wine, and the private communion held with a major gangland figure becomes a means of control. Human links are especially useful because it travel is important to us, possibly more than to any other covenant except the Carthians. There is no other way to find the knowledge we seek, suppress, and use. Nicknames: The Sanctified (within the covenant), the Church Eternal (old-fashioned), the Second Estate (used by the Invictus), the Judges (usually derogatory) Concepts Creepy nun, apocalyptic street preacher, father confessor, earnest student evangelist, delusional derelict, church janitor, night manager at the orphanage, Pentecostal middle-class professional, nurse, old-school BDSM enthusiast, uptight middle-aged bachelor or spinster of the parish, placard-wielder or leaflet-giver, “reformed” serial killer, librarian When we are in power In some parts of the world — Rome and the Vatican, Salt Lake City, Seoul and some parts of the American South, for example — the Sanctified wield enormous power. In these cities, the fist in our velvet glove is made of the strongest steel. Longinian eucharists are used to create blood bonds, and sometimes in Sanctified cities, nearly every vampire is in thrall to the Bishop. Even in these places, however, we pay lip-service to a temporal Kindred government, a prince belonging either to the Invictus or (slightly more rarely) the Carthians, who although in most ways a puppet of the Sanctified, puts his or her name to commands and orders. The Lancea et Sanctum does not, its Bishop says, command; it requests. It is for the temporal powers to command, and the Sanctified to recommend. When we are in trouble Christianity at its dawn flourished in times of persecution. Those cities where we are at our weakest are those in which our Christian herd are either persecuted (for example, in Pyongyang or Abu Dhabi) or are simply a minority in a secular city (as is the case in Stockholm or Tallinn). However, these places are often where the small numbers of Sanctified are the fiercest. We are both jealously secretive and openly dismissive of the other covenants, waging covert wars against more powerful vampires. We tend our human flocks and defend them against the people who would kill them, visiting terrible vengeances upon persecuting authorities. When against the wall, the Sanctified find their truest meaning. When threatened, we truly believe that we are doing God’s darkest will.